If one person creates a new process to make $3 widgets cost $2 and sells a billion of them, while paying his manufacturers $1 per widget, he made $1 billion dollars and each of their 1 billion customers are $1 wealthier.
What happens in practice is that one guy in a lab invents a new process in exchange for his paycheck, and then some very different guy in a suit gets to collect the money off that invention.
